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Funny you should mention bloated and slow in the same breath as OO.o, which I've found to be FAR slower than any MS Office version.

But what surprises the hell out of me is that nobody seems to want to admit and talk about that giant sickly elephant in the room, mainly How will OO.o/ LibreOffice keep up with MS Office now that they have no corporate sponsors anymore? Whether the community wants to admit it or not when you are talking a massive complex codebase spanning what? 2 Decades or so now? You really need top notch coders that have been working with it for years, as just getting up to speed will take ages for any new guys. I mean have you looked at the OO.o source? Its fricking massive!

Looking at where the money came from it appeared to be about 80% sun and the rest Novell. Well Sun is DOA and Novell go bye bye, so who is gonna shell out the bucks to pay the salaries of the coders that have been working on OO.o all this time? my guess is nobody, oh sure they may have a fundraiser or two but with "free as in beer" trumping all and the economy dead i don't see them keeping the OO.o developers for even a single year. Most likely they will start bleeding experienced coders if they haven't already, so how will they keep up?

Neither Apple nor MSFT is having ANY trouble in the money dept, which means plenty for R&D, bug fixing, QA, focus groups, and general polish for iWork and MS Office respectively, meanwhile you are gonna have this massive codebase with most likely nearly all the experience leaving if they haven't already. This is why I think ultimately "free as in beer" will have to DIAF and instead a new license that allows free as in freedom without the beer. Because making top notch programs sure as hell ain't cheap, and its gonna get more expensive not less as time rolls on.

Nobody is gonna want to use OO.o if it is stuck at 2010 when everyone else is at 2015, but I just don't see where they are gonna get the funds to keep up with the competition, I just don't. IBM is using their own fork so they don't need it and RH is about servers so I don't see them stepping up. I truly believe that as we see more and more Linux companies die or get bought out we are gonna be seeing this scenario play out again and again, with projects that everyone counts on ending up losing their funding and slowly but surely dying. Sorry to be a downer, but you can't keep top notch developers by offering them a 6 pack and an autographed RMS T-Shirt.

Microsoft's R&D on Office pretty much amounts to making the UI ever more pretty for the ads, yet cryptic, unfamiliar, and painfully difficult to use. If open office was just an office 97 clone, and remained forever that way, only adding new file formats when Microsoft gets the urge to break compatibility and make it difficult to keep using the old versions, it could remain massively successful by doing so... After all, office suites are an awfully mature product at this point. No mater how much mone

So how much of this is crap do you actually believe and how much did you pull out of your ass?

Slow? When is the last time you USED it? I used OO.o calc 2 years ago to do 3d rendering (via the graphs) using 1000x1000 point and transformation matrices. And I never ONCE found it slow. Not in rendering (believe me, there was some HEAVY math in there) nor scrolling (with a logitech fast-scroll mouse it didn't even lag behind at full speed). This "OO.o if slow" BS is just that, BS. The only remotely slow part abo

As someone who has to spend day after goddam day administering, IBM products: Lotus Notes and Domino (version 7) I have built up a long standing hatred of anything with the words IBM on them. To me IBM was (and mostly still is) big, bitty, incomprehensible, overly complicated, overly difficult, overly laborious, tedious, and frustrating. Lotus notes/Domino is perhaps the worst pile of garbage software I've ever used in my entire life.

Now, that off my chest: I gave Symphony a spin about a year ago, initial

Guessing that the "we" refers to "Sun Employees", I can add that the only company that I've met who used Solaris throughout their systems (RT acquisition systems, with administrative side-functions) also used Applixware. I was examining the product myself when I discovered StarOffice (as it was then).

Apollo had the same mentality. Secretaries (er, office administrators) had $20K Domain/OS workstations with 21" monitors (when those cost A LOT). I forget the word processing package for Apollo - it was pretty good at the time.

If I were Apache, I'd be talking really nicely to the LibreOffice devs. They've obviously got their stuff together and they're making the improvements people want.

At this point, I feel that Apache has inherited a name and nothing more. Anyone that wanted to fork an office suite would pick Libre over OO.o right now. And that's not likely to change any time soon. Why throw time and effort into an inferior product when it could just as easily go to the superior one?

They've obviously got their stuff together and they're making the improvements people want.

This was not my experience with the latest beta cycle of LO. I use Calc extensively and have since Open Office 2.0. LO 3.4 Beta 1 crashed on launch on the two Windows 7 (64 bit) systems I tried it on. I skipped Beta 2. Beta 3 and Beta 4 had numerous crashes and no apparent crash reporting tool. The new improved search UI doesn't allow me to check search all sheets or search values. I have to open find and replace to enable these and they are not sticky as in earlier releases. I have to enabl

If you don't like bugs in your software then I recommend you run the final releases instead of the betas.Your experience that the beta version of OpenOffice is more stable then the beta version of LibreOffice could be explained with that there is less development going on in OpenOffice.

I was comparing my experience with LO Beta releases with earlier OOo Beta builds and various Firefox development builds since Phoenix 0.6. In my experience the LO Beta 3.4 stability was comparable to the stability of nightly builds during development of Firefox 3.0. I expect to return to LO at some point unless Apache brings some significant improvements. My biggest hope is that one of these branches will fix the quirky font rendering that presents random chunks of the text you're editing in a fuzzy

No, your second paragraph is a misunderstanding of the situation...while one might argue, and with good reason, that LO is the better product the licensing is different so if the fork (as in Lotus Symphony...IBM) were wishing to be closed source it would have to be a fork of OO.o not LO as the LGPL licensing of LO would prevent the fork from remaining closed source. This seems to be the reason for IBM backing the Oracle choice of Apache, and its licensing model, as the recipients of the OO.o code.

Oracle got caught off-guard at how quickly LibreOffice was forked, how much traction it gained with contributors, and how many distros either already switched to it (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, etc) or have it in TESTING (debian).

Because of the differences in licenses, future improvements are a one-way migration from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, and not the other way around. With this move Oracle has pretty much killed off OpenOffice, leaving the field open for LibreOffice to be the de facto default for those distros that haven't switched.

Give it up. Really, just give it up. Your post is so much astro-turf it could be a soccer field.

Now OpenOffice represents a huge investment by Sun and by the virtue of purchasing Sun, thus by Oracle into Open Source software

First, Oracle does not get to "own" an open source project - ANY open source project - by purchasing a former sponsor such as SUN. The deal is "you bought it, as long as you continue to be good stewards, people will contribute to it, and you get the same benefits as anyone else who sees value in contributing to an open source code base. You start getting all 'we haz your soul', it'll get forked."

If companies can't live by those rules, they should not consider buying a company for its' open source projects, because their value proposition doesn't align with the community that keeps the project alive.

Second, (since you make mention of getting code into shape) SUN had committed in 2006 to a code cleanup; that didn't happen under SUN, and it didn't happen under Oracle, but it's happening under LibreOffice, because there's simply not any *need* to coordinate with the corporate overlords about resources.

Perhaps because OOo was just something Oracle happened to acquire as part of the Sun acquisition, and not something they actually care about, or have any reason to care about. An office suite never fit in with Oracle's product line. do you re

Unless they play their trump card, and use the fact that they own the copyrights, and can thusly relicense, so fork for you.

That's not a trump card at all.

Relicensing can't be retroactive, all they can do is to release the new version of OO as closed. And it won't help them any. People will just take the last openly licensed OO release and continue work from there. Meanwhile, the closed license on the new OO will make it impossible to integrate any improvements from LibreOffice.

The amount of money spent on engineers paid to work on the code base is quite large and if software development companies will be treated like Oracle was in this case, it is unlikely they will ever again invest into Open Source on this scale

Looking at the OOo progress these last 12 years since StarOffice, I think we should be happy with the enthousiasm behind LibreOffice.

Not to belittle the work of all those well-paid engineers, but what exactly have they been doing all this time? ODF, OOXML importing, database tool changes, exporting to PDF...

All fine and well that Sun open sourced the project, but it seems OOo has been hampered from the start due to Sun "owning" the project: progress has been minimal. It's time for fresh blood and a new start. It worked for XFree86, it'll work for OOo.

"...if software development companies will be treated like Oracle was in this case, it is unlikely they will ever again invest into Open Source on this scale."

Funny, at a first guess companies would think twice about becoming like Oracle. You know, you can't disturb unrelated people like you disturb your customers (although, a newby would think it is bad business practice to disturb your customers, the experience contradicts that hypothesis).

Finally the argument about which style of licence is best will be settled once and for all!:)

At the minute, BSD style licences are more trendy from a business perspective and big organisations like Apple, Google [youtube.com] and so forth see it as the best collaborative way forward. However there are GPL-esque projects have proven popular with companies (e.g. KHTML/Webikit) so it is far fro

At the minute, BSD style licences are more trendy from a business perspective and big organisations like Apple, Google [youtube.com] and so forth see it as the best collaborative way forward.

I think you're being overly simplistic. It's like stating white cases on electronics are more trendy than black and big organizations see them as they way forward. Rather, different licenses are more suited to different purposes. BSD style licenses are well suited to core technologies and reference implementations of new standards, where wide adoption is more important than getting continued code from all parties. Think zeroconf. It was a new technology and even though several major companies wrote implemen